Politics, Life, General Blogging

I can’t believe it’s May already. In three day’s time I will be 19, which is a scary thought as next year I won’t be a teenager any more! Slightly terrifying but as my Mum says “What’s the alternative?”.

Speaking of alternative… Today in the UK is the local elections and, perhaps more interestingly, a referendum on political reform. Currently we use a system called ‘First Past The Post’ (FPTP) which effectively means that the politician/party to get the most votes wins. Nothing wrong with this you might think, and no, somewhere which only has two choices would probably make good use of FPTP. However we no longer have only two parties, but three, four, maybe more. In this case parties can come into power with the most votes, but not a majority. Take last year’s election – the government was decided by just 1.6% of the electorate.

Now this obviously isn’t fair as it means that the majority don’t get their preference of government. When the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition with the Conservatives (ironically called the ConDem coalition), a condition of this joint power was a call for political reform – amazingly one of the only things that the LibDems have stuck to (see the massive lies about tuition fees…). So, today is the referendum deciding whether we should stick with FPTP or go to another system – the Alternative Vote (AV).

The AV is different from FPTP in that we don’t choose one candidate (unless we want to), but we rank the candidates in order of preference. If one candidate or party secures 50% of first preference votes then they are elected. Straight away this is fairer as it goes by majority, rather than numbers of votes. If nobody secures 50%, then the party with the least votes is knocked out and those people who voted for the knocked out party have their second preference counted. This process of knocking out and counting votes continues until a party has 50% of the votes.

I know a lot of people are against AV, saying that it will cost a ton of money and that it could lead to people having their votes counted more than once, but this isn’t exactly true. Alright, any reform will cost money but is it such a big issue to pay money for a fairer system? Also, some people won’t have their votes “counted more than once” at all. If your vote is counted once then good news, your candidate is still in the running! If not, then you still get to have a say on who you want in charge. This isn’t an unfair system.

People have also argued that there are better systems out there, and so they won’t vote for AV because we should be using a different system. This may be the case, however if people vote against AV in this referendum then we may be losing the chance for political reform entirely. The government will assume that we’re all fine with FPTP and probably won’t encourage another reform for many years. In that case, we’re stuck with FPTP whether we like it or not, and the other systems won’t get a look in anyway.

So, you can see what my vote is going to be today. As far as the local elections are concerned I haven’t got a clue. There has been very little campaigning round here, and so I don’t really know who my candidates are. From what I’ve looked up myself, most of them are crooks or lunatics so in all likelihood I won’t be voting for anyone.

In other news, mad revision time has started once again. I’ve managed to write up all of my notes from the past year of university. A mere 170 pages and 71,000ish words! All I have to do now is memorise all of it! At least I’m safe in the knowledge that I will have 13 peaceful weeks free of revision once these four exams are done with, and when I go back to university next year I will be expecting more interesting material to work with. At least, that’s for biological and cognitive psychology. The other modules look boring as hell. Ah well…

Oh yeah, I’m also setting up an F1 related website which is going to be a bit nerdy and will document my trip to the Nurburgring, as well as providing general information about F1 for those newbies out there who haven’t got a clue. I’m determined to get people of my age group into Formula One. Seriously, I know about three people my age who like F1 – It’s not good people!

Anyway, back to the revision. Expect a post next month when exams are over!